New Euro Super league to be announced Sunday
- Thread starter Clears Cleaver
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Can’t wait for him to roll out his FIFA reform plan where the “elite” nations play in an annual World Cup and the rest of the world gets larger solidarity payments.
I think that's wishful thinking out of British fans. Nobody has ever liked Kroenke, there is nothing but animosity there, and fans were hugely negative when the Glazers and FSG bought their teams as well. I'd guess they believe they will be loved if they win (most likely true), and that the investment is worth enough to them to weather the storm from things like this. That this idea failed this time doesn't mean a similar idea is going to fail in the future. There is going to be a revised champions league that will make them more money if they are in it (good luck Arsenal), and eventually some form of super league is going to happen, either by a breakaway like this, or more likely through an evolution of the champions league.
Regarding FSG: They took over from the George Gillette/Tom Hicks fiasco. My recollection was their fans were relieved that was gone and willing to give FSG a chance to make it work.
The Glazers takeover from ManU is the very definition of a hostile takeover. From the jump, the Glazers generated no goodwill and not a drop was offered by the supporters. Reading about the current state of Old Trafford is an embarrassment.
I agree that its wishful thinking to believe that they might sell due to fan backlash and animosity. Clearly they don't care about that.
But I'm not so sure about the financial calculus. A Super League might happen in the future, but this defeat surely puts that off for a good while now. The Super League would instantly raise the value of the founder teams pretty significantly so if this was being whispered about seriously for a while, it would never have made sense to sell in the last 2-3 years. Now that the time horizon on bringing this back again has been pushed way into the future, I could see one of the owners deciding to get out.
I'm probably just being cynical, but I don't think fuck all happens because of this. The megaclubs still hold the best cards at the table and any censure of them carries significant risk. In other words, I think this blows over and we're talking about the second UCL format changes to the ones recently approved within weeks.
I remember there were some rumors that the ESL clubs (or at least the EPL ones) got payments from UEFA to make this go away. Has there been any substantiation of that?
I remember there were some rumors that the ESL clubs (or at least the EPL ones) got payments from UEFA to make this go away. Has there been any substantiation of that?
I definitely don't see any real censure happening, maybe a token fine or something.
I think a lot of personal relationships are likely pretty broken so it'll be interesting to see how certain elements of football governance work. For instance, are people like Agnelli and Perez just going to be welcomed back to all the UEFA and ECA discussions or are they going to be treated as black sheep? In England, I think there will be hurt feelings and distrust but in the end the system needs the big six and can't afford to alienate them.
More "Konate to LFC is done" rumors resurfacing. I wonder if some of these teams go on a mini spending spree in an attempt to distract and make the fans forget. The irony is that they said they needed the guaranteed money from the Super League so they'd be shooting themselves in the foot (again) by spending freely without it.
Maybe I'm being pollyanna-ish, but one optimistic takeaway for me is that the immense backlash from all corners will blunt the "Super League" threats in the future. Whether they truly meant to go for it, or whether some of them still saw it as a bluff, the perception from outside the Super League owners was that it was real. We all saw the backlash, and the Super League concept collapsed like a folding chair. If Juventus and Real Madrid threaten a breakaway league in the future, it will lack credibility.
I guess I'm a cynic but the flagrant greed and deviousines of the SL teams didnt surprise me.
Although some of those quotes from the "sources" about the other epl teams are pretty stupid. Were these teams naive enough to think LFC, MUFC, etc gave a crap about them? Really? Yes it was shitty but dont add to it with the fantasy land idealistic crap just name your price/punishment because you're never getting genuine remorse from these clubs.
Although some of those quotes from the "sources" about the other epl teams are pretty stupid. Were these teams naive enough to think LFC, MUFC, etc gave a crap about them? Really? Yes it was shitty but dont add to it with the fantasy land idealistic crap just name your price/punishment because you're never getting genuine remorse from these clubs.
And it's not like the owners/management of the other 14 EPL clubs are all paragons of integrity and civic virtue, either.
I think a Super League is definitely happening in the future - possibly even the near future. My hope is that this Super League will now be an open system with promotion and relegation, and be tied into Europe's other international and domestic competitive structures instead of clearly trying to rise above it. I think most of the fans' backlash was against the closed, anti-meritocratic nature of the system, not necessarily the concept itself.
I understand why you call it greed and deviousness but look at it from the owner's side.
They are running multi-billion dollar businesses but their revenues can fluctuate hundreds of millions of dollars a year based on things beyond their control like pandemics, injuries, player drop-off. That's a super hard business to run.
I mean can you imagine a NFL where teams could face the consequence of not getting TV revenue one year? That would drastically affect the business planning - and the player procurement - for teams.
In a perfect world, owners want some measure of both cost certainty and revenue certainty. NFL and NBA teams have both. Soccer teams have neither. Sure it's romantic to think that a bad owner can get punished by being relegated but that's a hard business model for anyone to run.
Man City and Chelsea's decision to jump first was a smart one.
"It's the Americans who are the problem! Yeah! Fuck those guys, right?!"
"Attention planet earth! We hereby decree that we are blowing up the structure of European football forever! This is happening! This is not a negotiation or a bluff! From this day forward, everything will be changed! We are the Founding Members and we have given our decree to you, the mere Legacy Fans! So it is written, so it shall be done!"
48 hours later:
"Um, hey, us again. So remember that Super League thing we briefly mentioned? Actually, as it turns out, we're not doing that after all. Because um... we, like, care about you, or something. No big deal, everyone calm down, move along, nothing to see here."
48 hours later:
"Um, hey, us again. So remember that Super League thing we briefly mentioned? Actually, as it turns out, we're not doing that after all. Because um... we, like, care about you, or something. No big deal, everyone calm down, move along, nothing to see here."
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It's possible, but at least we've drawn a line in the sand that clubs can't cross. It's a low bar, admittedly.
Yeah, I am in this boat two. I admit to not being a soccer fan, but after a lifetime of no World Series titles and the fucking Yawkey family owning things, I can't get behind the vitriol toward an ownership group that has brought us 4 titles and the greatest comeback in all of baseball history at the expense of the Yankees!
I doubt those other EPL teams are that naive. But it gives them a good narrative at a time when public opinion is on their side, so that's exactly what they should be saying.
Wouldn’t the Super League have made it easier for non-big 6 English teams to get a crack at the highest level? The big 6 would be locked in and then there was another spot every year for a 7th English team, right? As opposed to 4 spots that are almost always taken by some combo of the big 6? I’m confused as to why this was seen as being so horrible by the English fans.
There's a pattern with the Sox and Liverpool:
-Take over a proud franchise that's well below its peak
-Excel in player acquisition, finding plus-level talent at great prices, with some big spends on big names (I don't know that much about how LFC's decision making process in scouting and signing Salah, for example, but there was likely some first class data crunching going on, a la Henry's background and Theo with the Sox)
-Improve the fan experience
-Improve profitability
-Win titles
-Look to take a very profitable enterprise and make it even more profitable, in the process disrespecting and insulting the fan culture and de-emphasizing competitiveness
-Smug self-congratulation and tone-deafness re: same
More when I have more time.
For some fans it is simply a matter of principle who don't like the idea of the wealthy absolutely dominating everyone else. Other fans simply like having their own national system with teams playing the old teams they always play and have a lot of history with.
A lot of fans recognize that a Super League would be financial ruinous for the clubs not involved. EPL TV rights would crater without the big six.
This is all true, but I suspect part of the problems associated with the failed launch of the Super League is too many of these owners expected their fans to think like them and consider their business aspects and understand the move, and so they didn't lay the groundwork for the PR necessary to win over public opinion. We see a lot of the "fans thinking of the business" in US sports, like when fans recognize a team cuts a player for salary cap reasons, but (in part because player salaries and other financial details are much more opaque) European football fans don't do that to the same extent. What you call a "perfect world", for example, is a perfect world for owners, but "cost certainty" = things like salary caps that from a fan perspective limits their clubs' ability to assemble a Galacticos-style squad.
The whole announcement could be a case study of failure at B-schools. Like, WTF was this: “The pandemic has shown that a strategic vision and a sustainable commercial approach are required to enhance value and support for the benefit of the entire European football pyramid.” This isn't an S-1 filing, this is your press release to try to sell the Super League. Tell the fans how the Super League will give them better, more exciting soccer. They don't want to hear business jargon and they don't want to hear the woes that billionaire ownership groups face in running their clubs.
Which is a fair take. I don't value EPL or Liverpool, so as long as Henry's actions don't have any impact on the Red Sox his looking like a shmuck to another team's fans doesn't bother me.
Definitely agree with this. One other things the owners had to do - and I'm shocked that they never thought about it - was to ensure that players get something out of this. Something to the effect of, "Instead of having 20% of the TV rights fee go to administration and overhead, we are going to put at least that much into player development, player salaries, and revenue distribution payments.
If the goal of the Super League was to replace UEFA, they had to isolate UEFA and figure out how to get buy-in - at least in the beginning - from the other participants.
I think it's going to happen eventually but as you say, at least we have a B-school case study out of this.
English fans know the Big 6 aren’t set in stone, which is different from the Spanish La Liga situation. Man U and Liverpool have the longest history of success of the teams but even then you don't have to be a particularly old fan to remember fallow periods in their history. Man City and Chelsea only rose in prominence when they got wealthy owners. Arsenal have a good history but lately have the rep of being good but not great. And the inclusion of Spurs, who haven’t won the title since 1961 and whose main claim to being part of any big 6 is only due to recent success, was a joke. So English fans of other teams reacted in part to entrenching a hierarchy that is really a snapshot of this moment in time.
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They are also saddled with an incompetent and corrupt UEFA controlling the marketing of the European product while also facing competitors like PSG and City that are playing an entirely different financial game. I don't think its hard to understand why owners used to the American sports model would be very frustrated. Not a lot of NBA owners would be happy if FIBA was the entity negotiating some of their biggest TV contracts and the governments of Cuba and Venezuela were allowed to buy the Grizzlies and the Kings then completely circumvent the salary cap to dominate the league.
These owners have some very legitimate complaints, as does anybody who really cares about the health of football in general. The game is in worse shape now than it has ever been in the PL/CL era. But the whole gambit was such an utter fiasco that I can't see the Super League idea returning again anytime soon.
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And in the year that the Grizzlies and Kings were in the Finals, the Cs had injuries to JT and JB and found themselves in the G-League next year with $130MM payroll.
I mean Barca has a billion dollar budget of which almost 1/2 billion go to soccer player salaries - https://en.as.com/en/2020/03/27/football/1585307221_014532.html. Missing out on the $50MM that comes from the championship league or even $40MM from only going to the quarterfinals is a substantial blow when Barca only made something like $300MM in TV revenues in 2019-20.
It is astounding to me that Barca only makes hundreds of millions a year in TV revenues. Barca is generating a lot of money for other people/teams.
One of the major PR failures of the ESL was that it got lost that no part of the proposal involved breaking away from the domestic leagues. The ESL was specifically intended as a Champions League replacement only. There should have been a minimal effect on EPL tv rights, for example.
Now people have may have read into it (perhaps correctly) that the ultimate unstated goal was to eventually escape from the domestic leagues. But that wasn't on the table here. Thus the massive PR failure.
I don't think this was broadly misunderstood. But what it would have done is rendered the EPL meaningless for most teams, since qualification for the ESL was guaranteed for the "big 6". I don't think fans would get upset about reformulating or even replacing the champions league - it was the guaranteed spots for the "top" teams and the feeling that these teams were pulling up the ladder behind them right as the fight for a top 4 spot has become more difficult.
Yup. Barca have been run completely incompetently in the last half decade , especially with regard to player acquisition and costs, so I can't be too sorry for them, but its a very weird business situation they face.
The other big part of the picture is that the real driver of revenue growth for these clubs in recent years has been commercial revenue but there are actually two very distinct tracks among the super clubs in that regard. Clubs like Barcelona, Real Madrid, and Manchester United (or less successfully Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Juventus) are trying to drive commercial revenue through market value sponsorship deals. The value of sponsorship to partners in a market situation depends on the number of fans these clubs have, so its really a big contest to grow your global fanbase (which requires winning things, playing in CL, and signing big superstar players). But PSG, City, and Bayern - for various reasons - have been able to drive commercial revenue to very similar extents despite being nowhere near as popular, as they have corporate partners willing to pay them a lot of money for other reasons. The size of their commercial revenues isn't really tied that strongly to their global fanbase at all. Barcelona has 270m social media followers worldwide (generally accepted in footballing circles as the best measure of global popularity) and PSG and Bayern each have only about 90m, but PSG and Bayern have similar commercial revenue. City and Arsenal have about the same number of social media followers worldwide, but City's commercial revenues are twice as large, etc.
One of the big fears for the first group of super clubs is not just that failing on the pitch - not qualifying for CL but also just not winning big trophies even for those who regularly do - will lead to a dip in immediate broadcast revenues, but also that it will lead to strong headwinds on the commercial side (some of the big deals for the market-based clubs actually have CL participation and success written into them), which will then make it harder to get back to success on the pitch. This is essentially the trap in which Arsenal has been stuck for a long time (greatly exacerbated, of course, by their own incompetence). The three clubs that don't really have to worry about this trap are probably not coincidentally the three clubs that were least enthusiastic about the Super League - PSG, Bayern, and City.
I mean, isn't the EPL supposed to be meaningful on its own terms? If the problem is that most teams have no shot in hell of ever competing for the title, and so shooting for finishing 4th and making the CL is all they have to hope for, and the ESL took that away from them ... then the problem runs much, much deeper than the ESL, and the collapse of the ESL solves absolutely nothing.
I didn't know about 75% of what you wrote here so thanks for laying it out. Very informative.
I just don't understand the draw of this to some of these clubs--yes, the money, but what do they think their fans will do if their sitting mid-table or whatever in this Super League, so you're just plodding along, and you don't have to worry about the PL because you're already in the ESL next year...where's the drama?
It's pulling up the ladder on all the other teams (Leicester, West Ham, Everton) who are now realistic threats to make it into Europe/Top 4. Given the amount of money that the top teams stood to make from the ESL, the gap between the teams already in the elite and the challengers would be wider. It basically sets in stone who the "top" teams will be going forward.
Then there is also this point:
The EPL is meaningful because it's not winner-take-all: the fact that fans of most EPL teams can dream of shooting for 4th and making the CL is not a problem, it's a way to get a larger group of fans excited. The ESL took away that definition of success.
Both Barcelona and Real Madrid have historically bought star players ("galacticos") they didn't even need - damaging the squads of other very good clubs in the process - just because they could, and because it made for good PR (often on behalf of a club president that wanted to make a statement, independent of whether the manager wanted the player in question). I have zero sympathy for them and the mountains of debt they currently possess: one might say that they deserve to have additional revenue coming in, but that's true in large part because they pursued a transfer model that was never, ever going to be self-sustainable.
If you were mid-table under the Super League format that was tossed out, you're still in the fight to qualify for the knockout round as the 4th or 5th place team in your division and then anything can happen in the knockouts, especially if you've closed the gap on the top teams in the world due to being in the Super League in the first place. And if you're getting 200m a year guaranteed from being in the Super League, then you also have a much better chance of being in the race to win the PL if you're one of the four teams not from Manchester. The ESL would definitely have introduced more parity within the top six.
This was an effective criticism that never held up to scrutiny. The ESL would have still assumedly given one of its qualifying spots to a team from the PL, so non big six clubs would have had a better shot at winning that than they do at finishing top four under the current system. Only once in the last fifteen years has a non big six team gone to the CL. And even if they missed out on that qualifying spot, they would have been competing for spots in some other second tier European competition. I think there would have been a pretty similar amount of clubs with something to play for as the status quo, if not more.
The real dream that the ESL would have taken away isn't that your scrappy mid-table David-of-a-club could defeat Goliath, its that your club also could be bought by a wealthy Russian oligarch or the sovereign wealth fund of a Middle Eastern dictatorship and have them spend a billion dollars to become Goliath.
I think rhwill is right that the biggest thing people reacted against is the impression that other clubs were pulling up the ladder and the sense of injustice involved in that. But the reality is that climbing the ladder without a certain kind of owner is essentially impossible.
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CHB is giddy with glee over the fiasco in the Globe. He took the opportunity to go over every misstep of John Henry's tenure. Fish in a barrel for our curly haired friend.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/04/21/sports/huge-victory-soccer-fans-huge-setback-john-henry/
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/04/21/sports/huge-victory-soccer-fans-huge-setback-john-henry/
The flip side of that being the reality is that it would've been true even with some sort of promotion/relegation system. The huge failure here was to unnecessarily create a sense of injustice - the whole "enshrining the big 6" thing not only took away the dream from fans of the non-big 6, it also took away the sense from fans of the big 6 that their teams got there because they were truly elite. If they had said the Super League would always have 7 EPL teams based on the top 7 teams in the EPL, with maybe some provision as mentioned above for saying that the current Big Six would always be in for the first few years as part of taking on the risk of starting the ESL, I suspect there would have been much less backlash with honestly not a ton of risk for the six - you give the impression not of pulling up the ladder but of expanding the pie for EPL fans. This expansion comes at the expense of teams from non-top leagues, the Galatasarays and Portos of the world, but fans in the EPL don't care that much about that.
Totally agree. Thinking that they could get away with enshrining themselves as permanent members was an incredible miscalculation.
I'm sure we'll eventually learn a lot more of the backstory about how very wealthy and smart people developed a proposal that was so disastrously designed and sold to stakeholders. But I have to think that one of the lessons will be that when you plot this kind of thing in total secrecy among a very small and very homogeneous group of high level executives, you run the risk of making really big mistakes.
Well this is what Pep had to say, he didn't understand it either:
"It is not a sport where the relation between effort and success does not exist. It is not a sport where success is already guaranteed or it doesn't matter where you lose. It's not fair when one team fight, fight, fight at the top and cannot be qualified because it is just for a few teams."
Are they, though, at least in the soccer context?
Some people are really successful at one thing, get rich, and erroneously think they are experts at everything. Other people are just born into wealth. Genuinely asking because I don't know: has the current generation of Glazers done anything impressive other than be the offspring of a billionaire?
Florentino Perez sounds like a guy who is so accustomed to the privileged opulence of a club like Real Madrid that he's entirely disconnected from reality.
Here's the list of times that the "Big 6" have failed to make it in the top 7 since 2014, plus the other teams that were in the top 7:
- 2019-2020: Arsenal finished 8th; Leicester (5th) and Wolves (7th)
- 2018-2019: Big 6 were top 6, Wolves (7th)
- 2017-2018: Big 6 were top 6, Burnley (7th)
- 2016-2017: Big 6 were top 6, Everton (7th)
- 2015-2016: Chelsea finished 10th, Liverpool finished 8th; Leicester (1st), West Ham (6th), Southampton (7th)
- 2014-2015: Big 6 were top 6, Southampton (7th)
I probably should have written "successful" people. I don't think the Glazer kids have done anything particularly impressive. But Andrea Agnelli, while being born into wealth, has established a strong reputation as a very successful football executive and mover-and-shaker in the football world, Florentino Perez is a sort of comical villain but also has run the biggest football club in the world for most of the last two decades, John Henry and Stan Kroenke may be Yanks but both both are pretty savvy businessmen, Joan Laporta is a veteran lawyer, football executive, and Catalonia politician. I'm surprised they collectively didn't have a better strategy for a gamble of this magnitude.
to wit, we go to Paisajismo Total de Cuatro Estaciones in northwest Madrid:
View: https://twitter.com/fabrizioromano/status/1385008344180604939?s=21
Yup, and that is without those six clubs getting the head start of a few years with 200m in additional revenue.
I think this would be even more dramatic if you did the same analysis with top four in Spain. That is a stone cold lock for Real, Barca, and probably Atleti to make the Super League every year.
They could have done a 22 team league with 7 from England, 4 from Spain, 4 from Italy, 3 from Germany, 2 from France, and two from open European competition and they probably would have had much better buy in. Everybody gets a shot at a much bigger pie, only UEFA really gets screwed.
For Spain, yup, it's been Real/Barca/Atletico + one of Valencia/Sevilla/Villareal every one of those years.
I don't doubt it's a tough business for teams on the bubble. My friend took over as President of Valencia in 2017 and even though the new ownership brought in Champions' League success in his first two years (2017-2018, 2018-2019), a blip last year where they fell to 9th already had fans upset and made finances difficult. But Real/Barca really didn't need to enshrine their permanent position when it would have been a de facto permanent position.